Turns out there will be a chance for you to get a glimpse at all Avalanche rookie prospects before the start of regular training camp next Saturday.

The Avs will hold a mini rookie camp, from Tues.-Thurs. of next week, 9 a.m.-noon each day at Family Sports Center in Centennial. Here’s the catch: if you want to see them skate, you won’t have long. Most of the time the rookie spend at the practice facility will be spent doing off-ice workouts, away from the public eye.

But the Avs are saying that the rookies will skate for roughly half an hour, sometime in that 9-12 window. I don’t know the exact time. It could vary.

But this will be your chance to get glimpses of rookies such as Joey Hishon and Calvin Pickard and Kevin Shattenkirk and Colby Cohen, etc. Originally, there was talk there would be no rookie camp at all, of any kind. The thinking of the Avs was that too long of a minicamp, with too much skating, left the rookies burned out when the real camp arrived. So, this is a bit of a compromise.

(As we noted earlier, we’ll often take looks and give takes on other topics around the NHL here. Today brings a new installment).

Tampa Bay Lightning goalie Dan Ellis took his twitter account and went home today. Here is a briefing of the matter. If you want to skip the briefing, it can be boiled down to: Ellis tweeted some thoughts about the life of a pro athlete, especially when it comes to money. He basically said money can’t make you happy, and that he worries more about money than he ever did. He also said playing goalie is a specialized craft, like a heart surgeon is a specialized craft.

While we might have thought that last analogy was a bit unfortunate, we here applauded Ellis’ insights about money, and his honesty – no matter how little of the population (me included) can relate.

Of course, this brought the predictable tsk-tsk torrents from the arbiters of morality and good taste. The thought police came down hard on poor Ellis, to the point where it became a local story in Tampa, whose conclusion came today with Ellis’ cyber-sayanora.

Two points:
1. The thought policers just naturally assume having money in life guarantees a happy, financially worry-free life. Well, here was a guy saying that isn’t necessarily the case. Honest perspective from a corner of the world most can’t relate was simply that – perspective from a part of that world.

But the thought policers would have none of it, donning their high horses and launching their sermons once fully mounted. The snarky (yet admittedly funny at times) twitter hashtag #danellisproblems quickly became the platform for further mockery.

We saw honesty from Ellis’ tweets, the insight into the mind of a person with a different set of circumstances than most of us. The thought police saw the chance for a heapin’ helpin’ of some self-righteous piety, and dig right in they did (always remembering to prominently display their outrage for a couple days with ginned up SEO metadata to get that high google page rank).

2. Enjoy even less insight now from NHL players, thought policers. Enjoy more “We just gotta come out with our best effort and get the two points”, “We just gotta keep our shifts short”, “We gotta go back to basics, keep things simple” insight. After this, guaranteed there will now be a “Cautionary Tale: The Dan Ellis Incident” extra couple minutes to the annual briefing teams give their players when it comes to dealing the media.

We can’t wait for when the hockey media thought-policers get their knickers in a twist over the fact that “Players are so boring! They never say anything! They never say what’s really on their minds! Woe is us!”

When that happens, and it will, we can look back at the Dan Ellis Twitter saga as part of the reason why, and will learn yet again: Can’t have it both ways.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I once took my Twitter account and stomped off, full of self pity and moral outrage at being attacked over a tweet made over a shouting match involving Dion Phaneuf, overhead from the Calgary dressing room (all of which proved true, I might add, unless you believe Dion’s subsequent trade to Toronto had nothing to do with any possible chemistry problems between player and coach/team. That said, I’d probably handle the matter a little differently if such an incident crops up again. It was a little too rush-rush, instantaneous, which is both Twitter’s appeal to much of the media and its constant cautionary warning).

I hope Ellis reconsiders and comes back to twitter-ville, as I soon did (and as anybody who remotely knows me at all knew I would).

Terry Frei graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in the Denver area and has degrees in history and journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News while attending CU and joined the Post staff after graduation. He has also worked at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., and The Sporting News. His seventh book, March 1939: Before the Madness, was issued in February 2014.

Chambers covers college and professional hockey for The Denver Post. He has written for the Post since 1994, after dumping his first 9-to-5 office job a couple years out of college. He primarily follows the University of Denver hockey team and helps cover the Avalanche.